Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe by William Guynn, and: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth-Century by Timothy Snyder (review)

• Published in: SubStance 2018, Vol.47 (2), p.175-196
• Main Author: Scullion, Rosemarie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Camus, Albert (1913-1960); Democracy; Drezner, Daniel W; Historiography; Modernity; Motion pictures; Museums; Police; Politics; Snyder, Timothy; Translation; World War II
• ISSN: 0049-2426; 1527-2095; 1527-2095
• DOI: 10.1353/sub.2018.0027

With wisdom garnered from his study of the European past, Snyder emphasizes that time is of the essence in defending democracies when authoritarians appear on the horizon. Since autocrats are adept at fostering illusions of omnipotence, the better to cow the citizenry they seek to subjugate, the first task in thwarting their aims is to dispel the notion that the tyrant's will has already triumphed. [...]people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. (31, translation altered) This is the very predicament Snyder and others who have written histories of regimes that formed police states and committed mass murder find themselves facing: how to convey the magnitude of those atrocities and the agony of that experience when conventional modes of historiography call for objective, dispassionate analysis, that is, discourses of rationality that can numb sensibilities and, as Camus's Dr. Rieux sees it, cloud the historical imagination? [...]one can see that Timothy Snyder's rather more normative histories of interwar and wartime Europe have themselves marked Guynn's analysis of the films he has chosen, each of which speaks, as Snyder does, to "convulsive" (11) moments of twentieth-century history.